Listen with Father

How I Learned to Love Classical Music

By listening to her father's favourite composers, Caroline Sanderson reconnects to him and to her past in this touching story of remembrance told through classical music.

'Blazes with love' Keggie Carew

'Warm and insightful' Polly Morland

'A love song to classical music' Rachel Joyce

Listen with Father is a book about the transformative power of listening, and about how we remember those we have loved and lost.

At four years old, Caroline Sanderson fell in love with the music of Mozart after listening to it with her father. At eight, she fell even harder for the songs of David Bowie. Her dad made many gentle attempts to persuade her back to his world of classical music, but it wasn’t until after he died that she returned to it, in memory of him.

In a beguiling blend of memoir and biography, we follow Sanderson as she set out to listen, with great care and attention, to the music her dad loved, to work out why he so appreciated it and whether she could too. From hearing Mozart recitals in Salzburg to visiting Sibelius’s house near Helsinki and playing Robert Schumann at home on the piano, this is a beautifully touching and absorbing story of a beloved father, told through the classical music he cherished.

'A tender meditation on listening – to music, to memory and to the conversations we wish we’d had' Freya Bromley, author of The Tidal Year

'Like the best classical music, it ignites our imagination, and is a deeply human adventure in music's power to affect our emotional lives' Lily Dunn, author of Sins of My Father

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